Here in Charlottesville the city doesn’t have the budget and/or the will to properly sand and salt the roads. Today’s “storm” is only supposed to bring 4 inches but the schools are closed and a lot of businesses are shutting early. Since the temperature is not going above freezing, the roads will be very icy. It’s kind of nuts.
Here in Roanoke, they cut a chicken’s head off and decide based on whether the decapitated corpse flops left or right. At least, that’s the best I could ever tell.
Some days there’d be a prediction for a couple inches, and they’d shut down half the world with nary a flake in sight. Other times, there’d be a solid sheet of ice on everything short of I-81, and schools would open without so much as a delay, resulting in bus accidents and parents ending up in ditches. Even this wasn’t consistent, so you couldn’t reliably play the opposites game either. It got worse as the years went on; figuring out on any given night whether you’d have school the next day became impossible, so eventually most parents stopped trying and just kept their kids home whenever it made sense, checking the school closings only if it hadn’t actually snowed at all.
Now, that was a few years ago (I graduated in '02). According to a teacher friend of mine, attendance started getting so poor on snowy days that the administration has since adopted the “close at first mention of flurries” method described in the OP.
We just went through this a couple of days before Thanksgiving here in Portland. For two days the media kept going on and on about it was going to snow, and it was going to be a disaster, and we were all gonna die, yadda yadda yadda. “Special Reports,” preempting regular programming, the whole nine yards. :rolleyes: A long list of schools closed in anticipation. The amount of snow we actually got was… less than spectacular. I could sort of see a hint of white in the grass outside my apartment, and there were little patches of snow here and there on the sides of the roads.
I swear, after your posts about Louisville and Indianapolis … I was waiting for Nunavut Boy to come into this thread and post about how it doesn’t snow up there very much 
We’re known for rain storms (which is strange, because we don’t really get storms - we get constant drizzle). And even though Seattle is farther north than Buffalo, we get ~8 inches/year to their 93.6 inches.
I remember bunch of times growing up in Michigan, when they cancelled the school bus for everyone, but not school. I remember my parents being pissed every single time.
In the Seattle area, it’s not so much that they don’t know how to drive in it, the problem is you can’t ignore physics.
You can’t turn off gravity on an icy hill and you pretty much can’t go anywhere without hitting multiple icy hills. I typically see only a handful of problems with people on flat roads.
They canceled school today because we got 3" of snow. In Indiana. Good grief, they’ll cancel school for a heavy frost, it seems like.
I teach in a rural Maine school district and we have 7 snow days built into the school calendar. More than that and we make them up–fewer than 7 means getting out for summer vacation a bit early. The snow-day call all depends on whether the buses can safely get the students to school. One bus accident in snow + one litigious parent can make a school board cringe!
A couple of years ago, our superintendant was new and cancelled school 15 times! We did a couple of Saturday sessions, turned two workshop days into student days (which teachers made up by staying until 7:00 p.m. x4) and closed for the summer on June 22. It was a layabout winter but a bitch of a spring.
Last year, while the bulk of the east coast was experiencing record snowfall, all the storms missed us up here, and we didn’t have a flake in the air after the first of February. Spring came early to Maine and so did summer vacation. 
I live in Montgomery County, MD and we generally had about 2-3 snow days a year growing up. The county is huge, with lots of back roads and widely varying conditions and heavy traffic, and just because it’s OK in Silver Spring doesn’t mean it’s OK in Gaithersburg. Generally anything more than an inch was good for a delay or closing. They usually had 4-5 days built into the calendar.
Then there was the Blizzard of 1996, which was good for a week plus off, and the Blizzard of 2003 which I think was about a week. This past winter, of course, we had Snowpocalypse, which dumped 3 feet of snow and shut down literally everything, and the December storm before Snowpocalypse that was 2 feet and shut down everything as well. I think the public schools used up 10+ snow days at least. I’m a grad student at the U. of Maryland and even we had a week off. They might have made up one day, but I believe the state gave a waiver for the other days because the necessity of paying all the support staff to come in extra was too big a strain on the budget. This happened in 2003 as well.
The roads were a total mess today, though. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with PG County but I could tell exactly where the line was with Montgomery County because as soon as I crossed it the roads went to crap like they hadn’t been treated at all.
I was in Seattle in 1993, I think it was, and they had a fairly large storm near Christmas. I read in the paper at that time that Seattle own a whole four snow plows! I was there on the weekend before Thanksgiving and on Monday they had a snowfall of about 3 inches. They cancelled schools all over for both Tuesday and Wednesday. I will say that Seattle is hilly and hardly anyone has snow tires. Still I drove while I was there and I had no problem.
Now in Montreal it is different. We had over a foot (32 cm) of snow last week after the weatherman predicted 2 to 4 cm. So no one was prepared, right. The city was slow off the mark with salting, sanding, and plowing, but no public schools closed (a couple wimpy private schools did). My youngest was in school from 1979 to 1991 and didn’t have one school closure in 12 years. My two older kids had a couple snow days in the 70s, but that was all. And we average 100 inches of snow a year. One year–a year I was fortunate to be away for–they had 180. We’ve had a couple inches a day for close to a week now, but no one pays any heed to it.
I just never realized snow occurrence was not mostly determined by latitude. I’m pretty sure I live further south than the OP, and there’s no way school would be canceled for the threat of snow. And our superintendent has people who check to see if the roads are actually slick before calling off school, which almost always happens at 6:00AM the day of. It’s just too hard to get all the school days in otherwise, as we have only 5 snow days built in to the schedule.
That said, classes almost never start late–if it’s bad enough for that, it’s bad enough for school to be out.
My local school district will cancel school at the drop of a hat. They typically start with a delay, which means that school will start at 10:40. This buys them some time because if the weather isn’t as bad, a delay doesn’t count against the allotment of snow days. On the other hand, if the weather and/or roads are bad (or worse, in the case of Snowpocalypse I and II), they’ll cancel school outright. The district started doing the delays first when they had to cut into spring break to make up some unnecessary snow days. Lots of VERY unhappy families.
But why? I understand the lack of snowplows, but here they don’t bother to plow if it’s less than 2"-3" of snow. The idea of plowing for half an inch, never mind close the roads, is ridiculous.
We moved to Ct back in Jan 1990. I was raised in western NY, in that lovely snow belt. My mom grew up on a small farm during the depression in the midwest. mrAru’s mother also grew up on a small farm in the midwest, just not during the depression. When you tell us to expect a major nasty storm, we understand stocking up for a possible stranding at home for more than a few days.
So they announce this huge lifeshattering storm. People go nuts and supermarket shelves get stripped [of milk and perishables, go figure] so we stock up on about 5 gallons of water in jugs, a nice selection of candles, fresh batteries for the 2 camp lanterns, the radio and a small portable tv. We pick up makings for a few pots of vegan minestrone, some dry sausage and a bunch of nonperishables that can be cooked on our woodstove. We stocked up the back deck with wood from the larger pile and put it under a tarp to keep it dry.
We get a couple inches of freaking snow overnight.
OK, where is the snowstorm we were promised? I am positively confused. mrAru drives the 25 miles down to base to find guys [not from the great lakes weather belt, or the rockies weather belts] discussing how horrible the storm was and how they were upset that they hadn’t closed down base …
Sorry, a couple inches of snow over 8-10 hours is a dusting … not a freaking storm of the damned decade…
I’m 44 and grew up in Virginia, we’ve always been snow adverse, but it seems worse now then when I was a kid. I remember as a kid listening to the radio in the morning as they announced school closings, it was like winning the lottery when they called your county. VA absolutely has the equipment, but people just don’t know how to drive on snow.
Because drivers have near zero experience driving on the stuff. Its easy for us in Minnesota - although the first snow brings out both the “I can drive 70 mph through this and weave through traffic - I have an SUV” (often passed in the ditch a few miles down the road) and the “Oh, God - SNOW. Must drive at a speed a Big Wheel can pass!!!” We get over it quick.
As someone mentioned upthread, when the South gets snow, its often because the temperature is hovering right near freezing - its the melt and formation of ice that REALLY scares them.
Speaking of Louisville, I remmber living there in the early '90s. In addition to having no snow equipment (the city had to borrow plows from the airport) everyone thought that they could still drive 75mph+ on I65, even with the 2 inches of snow and ice. Really, shutting down the city for a day or two was for the best. 
It depended on where I lived. Pennsylvania could handle it, I don’t remember ever missing any school for snow there. North Carolina had about half a snowplow to service the entire state. 
Two inches could do us in there. I don’t ever remember it being canceled before the snow actually started falling, though. As someone said, maybe modern weather detection equipment being more accurate might have something to do with it.
I don’t know how many schools in my current area were affected, I know some had snow days when we got several inches of wet snow a couple weeks ago, and it completely paralysed the entire region’s transportation network. It hit during morning rush hour and then just kept coming down all day, so the roads were already clogged with stuck cars and trucks before the plows could get out to clear them, and the trains were canceled left and right for various snow-related reasons. My husband was stuck in town overnight because there simply wasn’t any way for him to get home after work. No trains, the buses and taxis had been pulled from the roads by the companies and in some places the police, and it was difficult finding him a hotel room because a lot of other people were stranded too. There’s no way in hell this amount of weather would have caused any such problem back in Winnipeg, but they’re just not prepared for it here at all.
Back in the 70’s there was a snowstorm of such proportion, schools and businesses were shutting up starting at noon. (My cousin and I left work at 1 p.m. on the dot and arrived in the area of ‘home’, ditched the car in a snowbank, and walked the rest of the way. It was 8 p.m. at night. It took 7 hours to drive 10 miles.)…One week later, on a bright and sunny day, our local Weather God proclaimed on the local TV news that the barometer was plummeting and we were in for another battering. Everything closed down, work, school, everything (the workers at the grocery store were prepared, yet again, to sleep on COTS in the back area of the store!). We all held our breath and…nothing. Sun kept shining in a blue sky, for three days in a row. … BOY, were people MAD! I’m surprised the local Weather God wasn’t taken out onto a frozen lake and stuffed into it through a hole in the ice.